Safer Times: The Good Day's Work Blog

How to scale safety training programs across many locations

When selecting and building a safety training program, it’s largely agreed that a single system is most effective, especially for tracking. While that’s a top priority, we’ve often found 2 other factors that are overlooked when it comes to effective safety training:

1. Maintaining Training Quality

As you add more locations to your operation, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain consistent and high-quality training, due to many factors.

Despite this challenge, each location is critical. As we have worked with clients, we have found that the central building block to safety culture is the location, not the company at large. Meaning having a good safety culture at your primary location isn’t enough - safety has to be foundational at each of your locations, even if only a few miles apart. Additionally, individual training is a good foundation, but group training and discussions really build a true safety culture and can further develop a healthy team.

Combine those 2 factors and you get a “group-based training by location” strategy that will take your safety training to a new level. This often takes the form of the safety manager leading training at each location, since location managers are not necessarily safety experts. This is a step in the right direction, but it can have challenges with buy-in from the local team, since the “corporate” safety manager is leading the initiative instead of the location manager.

2. Minimizing Internal Costs

Once there are more locations than the safety manager can lead training at, the first instinct is to either reduce training or hire another safety director. Both options can potentially be a mistake. Reducing training will lead to more risk exposure, and another safety director can be both costly and difficult to hire, increasing your costs. It also doesn’t solve the potential problem with lack of locational buy-in.

The solution

We have seen the most effective solution be a centralized training manager or safety director that leads and plans the training effort, often leveraging external resources for lesson planning and content. The location managers are then assigned to the group training portion and equipped with the appropriate lesson content from the safety director. Group training at each location led by local management is the most effective way to increase learning results and minimize cost as you scale your training program.

How Good Day’s Work Can Help

We provide a system with the flexibility for managing group training, and Leader-Guides that allow anyone to lead effective group training with minimal prep time. Our system allows you to equip local managers and leaders to facilitate safety training to increase buy-in, while ensuring quality and consistency. This results in better learning retention at a lower overall cost to your organization.